Todd Phillips' "School for Scoundrels" is that rare thing, a sharp, non-raucous, near-perfect little comedy. The premise — an underground training course for nerds, fools and losers — is delectable. The laughs, which are abundant, arise out of the brightly written characters and the woeful situations they keep finding themselves in. And the comic tone — which is sparkly and romantic, but leavened with unfortunate truths about men and their sometimes deplorable natures — is maintained with a light, masterful control. You may have seen the trailer for this movie. Ignore it. The trailer conveys nothing of how wonderfully funny the film really is.

The actors are ideally cast. Jon Heder ("Napoleon Dynamite"), with his ever-present air of bucktoothed defeat, plays Roger, a male meter maid with the New York City parking police. Puttering around town in his three-wheel ticket-mobile, he's so easily menaced by parking violators that he winds up forking over his own cash to pay their fines. Home alone in his apartment, he reads self-help books ("You Can Be Happy") and dreams of asking Amanda (Jacinda Barrett), the girl next door, out on a date. When he works up the nerve to do so, however, her hovering roommate, Becky (Sarah Silverman), proves so ferociously sarcastic that Roger has a panic attack and passes out.

One day, an acquaintance tells Roger about a secret school for dweebs just like him. (It worked for this guy: "I'm dating two Asian chicks," he boasts.) Roger takes the number and winds up in a classroom filled with, well, dweebs just like him, chief among them Eli (Todd Louiso), Diego (Horatio Sanz) and Walsh (Matt Walsh). Then he meets their instructor, a possible sociopath who calls himself "Dr. P" (Billy Bob Thornton). "This is not a goddamn Tony Robbins seminar," Dr. P barks, by way of welcome. "If you're looking for 'Chicken Soup for the Soul', get the hell outta here!"

Dr. P guarantees to help his students awaken the inner male lion that's currently sound asleep within them. He dispenses useful maxims ("Friends are just obstacles that stand between you and success") and is particularly astute on how to score with women. (One of his rules: "No compliments, ever." Another: "Lie, lie, lie some more.") He equips them with the indispensable accessories of hipness — hair gel and shades, to be worn day and night — and, with his towering aide-de-camp, Lesher (Michael Clarke Duncan), he leads them out into the woods on tough-guy training exercises with ".45-automatic paint-ball guns" — and no protective gear. ("Be dangerous," Dr. P advises, "it's cool.")

Soon, Roger is brimming with new-found gumption, and he's finally able to ask Amanda out on a date. Dr. P finds this breakthrough interesting. Actually, he finds Amanda interesting, and after some preliminary stalking, he decides to move in on Roger's action. But Roger is a more apt pupil than P realizes, and he determines to fight back.

The movie is rich with bits of peripheral comic business, which I won't ruin by relating. (Todd Louiso — as always, a study in trampled dejection — is especially funny; and in smaller roles, so are the invaluable Luis Guzmàn, as Roger's dim-bulb cop-shop sergeant, and Ben Stiller, as one of Dr. P's embittered former students, whose festering anger launches the film's inevitable revenge-a-thon.) Jon Heder's comic presence is a bit more substantial now, and he's a sweet romantic lead — strange, but sweet; you root for him.

But Thornton's Dr. P is the movie's comic motor. It's a part that could have been way-overplayed, but he mines the character's monumental sleaziness and flagrant insincerity with a restraint that's amusing in itself. He also demonstrates a happy knack for slapstick when paired with Heder in a hilarious, hate-fueled tennis match. And at one point, he appears to lob a sly little personal dig through the movie's fourth wall: When Roger tells Thornton's Dr. P that his romance with Amanda is going really well, Thornton, who was of course once married to noted baby-fancier Angelina Jolie, responds with an eye-rolling "I'm sure you're just days away from adopting a Chinese orphan together." The man, like the movie, is a pure pleasure to watch.

"Jesus Camp": Kingdom Coming?

This startling documentary — a voyage deep into the culture of American evangelical Christianity — is a superior species of agitprop. There's no mistaking where the New York-based directors, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, are coming from ideologically — not when the sole voice of reason in their film is an Air America Radio talk-show host, and its score tends toward manipulative synthesizer swells of the forbidden-planet variety. But the filmmakers are scrupulous about letting their subjects — ultra-fundamentalist pastors, preachers and parents, and the children in whom they appear to be inculcating their beliefs every waking hour of the day — speak at length, without countering their every utterance with an oppositional talking head. The result is sometimes chilling, and a little scary.

According to a recent ABC News/ Beliefnet poll, 83 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians; of these, 37 percent (including two-thirds of black respondents) describe themselves as born-again evangelicals — people who accept the Bible as true, and feel called to spread its message among non-believers. "Jesus Camp" focuses on the more stringent evangelical subset of charismatic and Pentacostal Christians, whose practices encompass prophecy and speaking in tongues, and whose acceptance of the Bible as a rulebook for life appears to be near-total. As Ted Haggard, the politically powerful president of the National Association of Evangelicals, explains in the film, there's no need to wonder what to think about homosexuality (for example), because "It's written in the Bible."

The "Jesus Camp" of the movie's title is an annual rally of young children and their families called "Kids on Fire," which is held every August in (ironically) the city of Devil's Lake, North Dakota. This event is organized by a middle-aged "children's pastor" named Becky Fisher, a woman whose roly-poly likeability in no way obscures her steely religious determination. Fisher of course shares the Pentacostal antipathy toward abortion, homosexuality, the theory of evolution and political liberalism in just about every form. (Not to mention the Harry Potter books: "Warlocks are an enemy of God," she says. "If it had been in the Old Testament, Harry Potter would have been put to death!") And she's militant about spreading her particular version of The Word through an America that's adrift on a sea of religious and political permissiveness. The problem with democracy, she says, is that "we have to give everyone equal freedom, and ultimately that's gonna destroy us. ... We've got to stand up and take back the land."

The children we encounter in Fisher's orbit — home-schooled pre-teens, for the most part — are immersed in this stern world. They watch creationist videotapes, read Jesus-centric books ("Evangelism for Kids"), attend Children's Prayer Conferences, and do lots and lots of church-going. The footage of this latter activity is sometimes astonishing — we see boys and girls weeping, moaning, chanting, crying out to heaven in unknown languages and writhing on the floor in spasms of spiritual transport. And the message they ultimately derive from all this does not appear to be of the God-is-love variety. "Whenever I run into a non-Christian," says one boy, "there's always something that doesn't seem right ... something that makes my spirit feel yucky." Later, he says, "We're being trained to train others — train others to be God's army, and do God's will."

This is the kind of thing that worries liberals like Mike Papantonio, the Air America talk-show host. A Methodist himself, he believes that evangelicals, aligned with cultural conservatives generally and a born-again president in particular, are "committed to building a government that they're comfortable with. This isn't tinfoil-hat conspiracy stuff. It's happening. In the end, it's gonna come like a thief in the night."

Pastor Haggard (who according to the filmmakers confers with President Bush and his advisors once a week) heartily agrees. Sitting in his enormous church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, he says, "There's a new church like this every two days in America. [The evangelical movement] has enough growth to essentially sway every election." The struggle for the country's soul, he believes, is starting to look winnable: "Let the battle begin!"

What's most striking about this sort of religious zeal, of course, is its queasy resemblance to totalitarian Islam. Becky Fisher embraces the parallel. "I wanna see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as [radical Muslim] young people are to the cause of Islam," she says. "Because we have the truth." Even more unsettlingly, a visiting British pastor in the film asks a group of children clustered around him, "How many of you want to be those who would give up their lives for Jesus?"

In the same way that Islamic terrorists aren't representative of all Muslims, the militants in "Jesus Camp" obviously don't speak for all evangelicals (some of whom would no doubt argue that children of blue-state liberals are simply being raised in another kind of cultural cocoon). And the fear in Air America precincts of an impending evangelical theocracy is surely overblown. The portents are worrying, though, and they won't be going away anytime soon. "I gotta tell ya," says Mike Papantonio, "God is watching us."

 
— Kurt Loder

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